My university did ban p2p, no matter the content. Officially for upload bandwidth savings.

Mine did too. Though oddly the wifi in the classrooms was fair-game, but this was before most people had laptops, and even fewer ones that could last more than 2 hours without charging.

I remember downloading some content over IRC to share on the campus network because I knew how to use it and it was slow, but not blocked.

My university had bad wifi and I think 50mb drive space per student. I ended up plugging in my laptop directly and spoofing a whitelisted IP/MAC combination (the PCi just plugged out) for several assignments.

Those fees they charge the international students did go somewhere, then :-D

I had as much backed-up space as I could justify (some gigabytes by default), plenty of space for laptops where there were power sockets as well as 1Gb/s wired and fast wifi connections, personal webspace/server, a PostgreSQL database, a Tomcat server, remote SSH access to all computers and a distributed computing system (Condor).

Looking at the current guide for students[1], they also get access to a local Gitlab instance, a private IaaS cloud and a GPU cluster.

[1] http://www.imperial.ac.uk/computing/csg/services/

I don't blame them, it can end up costing a lot of the available bandwidth, and it's a finite resource.

My industrial experience year at university was at a research lab, working with satellite imagery.

I got two urgent panicked phone calls from the same person within five minutes of each other for bulk-downloading satellite images from, if memory serves, NASA.